Further Details:
Sony has announced a collector's edition of The Guns of Navarone starring David Niven and Gregory Peck. The film will be presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, along with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Surround tracks. Extras will include a new commentary by film historian Stephen J Rubin, a commentary by director J. Lee Thompson, a "Forging the Guns of Navarone" documentary, a â€œIconic Epic of Heroismâ€

Glad to hear that the new Caine Mutiny issue will have a commentary track because there is much to discuss. The novel was considered to be one of the few great works of fiction to come directly out of World War II (along with The Naked and the Dead and The Young Lions), but I feel the movie missed the point of the book entirely. It is not the story of paranoid Captain Queeg but a classic coming of age tale in which young, spoiled, rich and overweight Ensign Willie Keith slowly becomes a mature man and (in the book but not the movie) becomes the last Captain of the Caine. The actor playing Ensign Keith had a career that pretty much began and ended with this movie and it's a shame that Hollywood dumped such a classic theme in favor of some bad special effects in the typhoon scene and a showcase performance from Bogart as Queeg. You'll never hear anything bad about Bogart from me, but the truth is that he was much too old for the role. Sailors always called their Captain "the old man". but on wartime destroyer-minesweepers, the crew would have been in their early twenties or younger, and the Captain would have been in his late twenties. And, you know what is most maddening of all? I fully intend to buy this disc because they couldn't entirely wreck this great story even though they tried.

Belmondo wrote:Glad to hear that the new Caine Mutiny issue will have a commentary track because there is much to discuss. The novel was considered to be one of the few great works of fiction to come directly out of World War II (along with The Naked and the Dead and The Young Lions), but I feel the movie missed the point of the book entirely. It is not the story of paranoid Captain Queeg but a classic coming of age tale in which young, spoiled, rich and overweight Ensign Willie Keith slowly becomes a mature man and (in the book but not the movie) becomes the last Captain of the Caine. The actor playing Ensign Keith had a career that pretty much began and ended with this movie and it's a shame that Hollywood dumped such a classic theme in favor of some bad special effects in the typhoon scene and a showcase performance from Bogart as Queeg. You'll never hear anything bad about Bogart from me, but the truth is that he was much too old for the role. Sailors always called their Captain "the old man". but on wartime destroyer-minesweepers, the crew would have been in their early twenties or younger, and the Captain would have been in his late twenties. And, you know what is most maddening of all? I fully intend to buy this disc because they couldn't entirely wreck this great story even though they tried.

I agree with you that the movie is flawed adaptation of a fascinating book. (The book also illustrates much more clearly the degree to which Fred MacMurray's character is a coward by showing how intertwined his fate is with tht of Ensign Keith's.)

However, I think you're wrong about Queeg's age. It's fairly clear in the original novel that he's significantly older than the rest of the officers. Isn't there some reference to the fact that Queeg joined the navy during or just after WWI? That would place him at least in his early 40s at the time of the novel's action. Anyway, it's clear that, for Queeg, command of the Caine is meant to be a fairly unstressful assignment after having been sunk -- and spent several nights on a liferaft -- in the North Atlantic.

By the way, Robert Francis, who played Ensign Keith, also shows up in a sizeable role in John Ford's Long Gray Line. He's not a particularly good actor, but I believe his career ended due to an early death.

Go back a couple of posts and you can observe me mumbling about how Hollywood took a great book - THE CAINE MUTINY - and turned it into a disappointing movie. I now have the newly released Collector's Edition with an excellent commentary track and forty minute documentary, and I'm feeling much better. The commentators are two film experts (Richard Pena and Ken Bowser) and they give us a non-stop analysis that has a theme all its own - moral ambiguity. They tell us that the filmmakers were "a bunch of lefties", but the movie stands up for the U.S. Navy and the only real villian is the left wing intellectual played by Fred MacMurray. Director Edward Dmytryk (one of the original blacklisted Hollywood Ten) made this movie in the same year that Elia Kazan made ON THE WATERFRONT, and politics underscore the storyline in both movies. Interesting stuff and plenty of more conventional but interesting info on all aspects of the production. Even though Captain Queeg is a well developed character in the book, the commentators suggest that Bogart was further developing the type of man he portrayed in IN A LONELY PLACE and that Fred MacMurray only made an impression when playing an unsympathetic character, as here and in DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE APARTMENT. The documentary does repeat much of the information found in the commentary, but the disc is well worthwhile. Shame on me for sounding off before I had even seen the damn thing, or did moral ambiguity just hit home?

Enjoying Guns of Navarone as well as four other fine films based on World War II exploits:

Excellent DVDbuy, soon to be out of print. Admittedly, not Blu-Ray quality, though the special features included with each of the five discs and decent main feature resolutions make the package a must own, imo.